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Wednesday, July 10, 2013

This is the second part of my Blind Sight blog post. Please check out my first post here for an excerpt from Aniela's volume.Summary: While Aniela tries to escape a lifestyle where obligations take priority over friendships, she befriends Odette, a blind girl with the ability to draw. Almost immediately, concerns and questions arise as Aniela suspects that Odette’s gift is far stronger than any seen before. In the middle of family turmoil and a complicated romantic relationship with Odette’s brother, Aniela faces the realization that helping her comatose friend means disobeying her mother, something she has never done before.Here is a guest post from author Eliabeth Hawthorne!

The Inspiration for Blind Sight? Literature and Bad Table Manners

There are two sides to every story.That's the major premise behind how Blind Sight is written. Anyone who has ever listened to grandparents talk to each other without their hearing aids knows how funny those conversations can be. What one of them says is not always what the other one hears. Or trying to understand someone when their mouth is full, I wanted to capture the misunderstandings that occur when the perspective is limited to a single point of view, but I couldn't do it alone.

I was first inspired by Tom Stoppard who turned Shakespeare's tragedy, Hamlet into the comedy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Tom Stoppard's play follows the plot of Hamlet through the point of view of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, giving them their own voice and own plot so that even though it is the same plot, it is a very different story. It was exactly what I expected out of Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.
I made a few futile attempts to write the same story from different perspectives and eventually let the idea drop. I couldn't get the two sides different enough to where it felt like two different voices, but then I met Ermisenda on an RP site of all places. She was a brilliant writer, but more than that, she made me a better writer. We played off each other in a way that I just can't explain unless you've ever found that other RPer with whom you just click.
It was a true partnership, making Blind Sight a superior novel to anything we could have put together individually. It wasn't working from an already written manuscript and trying to put a new spin on it, we worked together every step of the way, literally RPing scenes over MSN and Skype since we live half a world apart.

-Eliabeth Hawthorne

This post is part of the Blind Sight Blog Tour. Blind Sight is an urban fantasy novel written in two volumes, each telling the story through a different character's perspective.